Which areas of operations and technology are most challenging to wealth management firms, and how are custodians and vendors perceived in supporting advisor’s operational needs? This is the main question The Collaborative and Advisors Perspectives answered in a survey of investment advisors and wealth managers conducted in May 2008. The study shows that document management, customer relationship management and portfolio management rank as the top three most problematic system areas, while billing and trading are the least worrisome.

While 83% of respondents rate the overall operations and technology support and systems from their custodian as “excellent” or “very good”, 47% say they their custodian doesn’t support them in any of their top three most problematic areas. Respondents were asked to answer several questions about their three most painful areas of operations and technology, chosen from the following 10 possibilities:

Aggregating all responses shows how investment advisors rank their ops and tech concerns:

Respondents were asked to rank their top three most troubling operations or systems areas. In compiling the results, we assigned the following weightings:

Ranking of most troubling area

Weighting

1

3

2

2

3

1

Based on these weightings, document management came in slightly ahead of CRM as the most troublesome area, but in the overall tally (most votes in #1, 2 or 3 ranking) CRM was slightly ahead of document management.

We also asked respondents to identify their biggest unresolved problems in each area they ranked as the most problematic, and the following themes were evident: